The present invention relates in general to multimedia entertainment systems, and, more specifically, to an audio multimedia player having dual access modes for navigating between track selections contained within a playlist.
With the emergence of techniques such as MP3 for compressing digital audio files, the number of track selections (e.g., songs) stored on a single medium (e.g., a compact disc, a hard disk drive, or a flash memory card) can become very large. For example, a compact disc (CD) with a capacity of 650 megabytes can store more than 10 hours of recorded music in many hundreds of separate MP3-encoded files. The MP3 format is formally called MPEG-1 layer 3, which was adopted by the Moving Picture Experts Group jointly operated by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electro-Technical Commission (IEC). A digital audio file with this encoding has a file extension of “mp3”. Many users are compiling extensive libraries of MP3 material for playing from their computers and from dedicated media players.
Other compression technologies are also known, such as AAC, which allow many individual digital audio tracks to be stored in the same individual unit of media. Furthermore, storage capacity of various media types (such as hard disk drives) are increasing to the point where large numbers of uncompressed files can be stored and simultaneously accessible to a player.
Media players for such digital audio media must provide ways in which the user of the media player can navigate to (i.e., choose) a desired selection for reproduction. In mobile applications, such as a personal handheld unit or an automotive entertainment system, the number of user controls and/or display sizes may be limited. Due to the large number of selections that may be in a particular playlist (i.e., a grouping of audio selections active within a player), the user must be able to rapidly move within the playlist. However, ways have been lacking for fast, simple, and efficient navigation among selections using an uncomplicated interface (e.g., a small number of push buttons and a display having few character spaces).
A typical user of MP3 files, for example, creates song collections in a personal computer environment, which has a rich user interface allowing for simultaneous display of large playlists and easy navigation. The files are normally stored in a directory-based file system within a hard disk drive of the personal computer. Files may be separated into many levels of directories and subdirectories in order to better organize and retrieve them.
For listening with a portable MP3 player, files are transferred from the computer hard drive to removable storage (e.g., a CD-ROM disc or a memory card or stick) or directly to internal memory of the portable MP3 player (e.g., via a USB connection). Especially when transferred (i.e., burned) to a CD-ROM disc, use of intricate directory structures may still be desirable to help cope with the large capacity of the disc. In an automotive audio player or other small, portable devices, the user interface is too small (i.e., lacks sufficient numbers of characters) to display directory structures that may be on a particular disc.